Big and Small Ideas by Rudy Owens

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You were surprised by Trump’s con job? Seriously?

President Elect Donald J. Trump and his famous hat.

Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked.” What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.

A lie is an allurement, a fabrication, that can be embellished into a fantasy. … Truth is cold, sober fact, not so comfortable to absorb. A lie is more palatable. … I found it far more interesting and profitable to romance than to tell the truth.

To those who expressed shock and awe the day after GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump won the Electoral College but not the popular vote on Nov. 8, 2016, I say, what freaking country have you been living in for the last 25 years?

If you were born any time before 1980, exactly what forms of dystopian thinking had overwhelmed your senses as you observed events unfold in your country and home town–year … after year … after year?

The outcome that brought smiles in the Kremlin and so wildly alarmed the much of the world, America’s progressive coalition, and the Democratic establishment was paved decades ago by the Republican Party and its supporters.

The GOP has unabashedly and shamelessly advanced a far-right agenda that makes the United States an extreme outlier in nearly every category compared to “advanced democracies.” And now the Democratic and progressive establishment say they are shocked by the election? Are you kidding me?

So, am I outraged that Trump lost the popular vote and was still elected? Absolutely. Shocked? Hell no, and not even remotely.

The GOP Establishment Primed the Nation for Trump

Adolph Hitler is one of history’s most infamous demagogues and the dictator who seduced Germany as he turned it into a totalitarian state that organized mass murder and global war.

Rather than an aberration, Trump was a pre-ordained messiah who walked through the giant blast hole the GOP created in our democracy over the last three decades. He also proved to be an adept and capable con artist, clever enough to employ all of the proven stratagems used by dictators throughout history, in nearly every civilization.

Anyone who has read anything about history or who has read writer Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, could recognize how Trump mastered the trade craft of power in the purest Machiavellian sense. But the real-estate mogul and reality TV star also exploited an exceedingly well-fertilized landscape, plowed for a generation by his GOP predecessors and moistened by the flood of unregulated money in American politics.

Trump’s performance as a titillating, transcendent messenger was similar to demagogues of the last century. He offered racial and economic salvation, while restoring “law and order,” deporting millions of non-citizens, building a wall with Mexico, and giving hate speech wide latitude to an increasingly agitated and well-armed white and right political base.

Even the right-wing publication The Weekly Standard—a foe of Trump—predicted Trump’s meteoric success perfectly in an August 2015 article, by Jim Swift. Swift described prophetically how Trump was using all the 48 tactics of past strong men of history: “Law 27 — Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following: As Greene writes: ‘People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow.’ How about ‘Make America Great Again?’”

Sadly, I correctly predicted the outcome myself in the spring of 2016, when I bet a good friend a beer that Trump would defeat his likely rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. (I have yet to drink that beer, and it will be the worst brew of my life.)

I knew he would win the “shocker” by the time he had won the South Carolina primary, where he repudiated the military legacy of the last GOP president, George W. Bush, and called the Iraq war a failure without any political consequences among evangelicals or traditional conservative voters. Here was a new creature who defied the rules–a characteristic of successful demagogues in history.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Youngstown) of Ohio’s industrial heartland, who is now challenging House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) for her job and pledging to reconnect with disaffected blue collar white voters, also predicted a dire outcome a month before the election. Ryan warned union members to not fall for Trump’s song and dance. “He will gut you, and he will walk over your cold dead body, and he won’t even flinch,” Ryan told a crowd of union members in Ohio in October 2016. “He’ll climb over your cold dead body and get on his helicopter.” And many of them did not listen.

Other wise people who saw this coming were filmmaker Michael Moore and commentator Van Jones—because it was so bloody obvious. They too were ignored.

In two key policy areas—guns, health care—Trump mostly used tested messages. Those soundbites and their political outcomes were already extreme before Trump became what Moore called a “human Molotov cocktail.” However, he was unexpected in several key ways.

Trump broke from the GOP orthodoxy on jobs and trade. He saw an opportunity to resonate with the disaffected working class in the industrial Midwest. He also proved to be a far better salesman than anyone in the GOP establishment. Lastly, he had a keener understanding of psychology than most of the highly respected, well-paid, and powerful individuals of the Democratic and Republican parties and the broadcast media, most of whom professed not to see the Trump tsunami coming.

Wal-Mart is the largest commercial retailer of guns in the United States, including semi-automatic rifles commonly used now in mass shootings.

Trump and Guns, Nothing New

Consider the domestic militarization of the United States since the early 1990s. GOP members of Congress and in state legislatures have worked lock step with the National Rifle Association since the passage of the The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1993.

America now has a virtually unregulated market of guns and semi-automatic weapons that are now considered inalienable rights of the majority of Republican-voting and mostly white Americans. There are now more guns than people in these United States of America. This powerful segment of the American electorate had turned their fringe ideas into mainstream GOP policy long before they voted for Trump.

These armed citizens who form the rank and file of a well-armed citizenry for years have muzzled lawmakers who might otherwise approve gun measures that put modest restrictions on the sale of weapons that kill about 33,000 Americans a year. During the campaign candidate Trump implicitly threatened to call these Americans into action against his Democratic opponent: “By the way, and if she gets the pick—if she gets the pick of her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I dunno.”

Trump merely echoed the GOP lines that had become accepted public discourse since the Columbine mass shooting in 1999. He was able to say it publicly without much rebuke because it was already normal to threaten gun violence against elected officials, putting them in “cross-hairs.” Immediately after the election, the NRA unsurprisingly announced an even more radical agenda it has been pushing, to allow concealed handgun permits to be accepted in every state and to legalize silencers—yes, silencers.

The GOP has fought doggedly for more than six decades to prevent the United States from adopting a national health care system or even insurance plan. As a result, the country is the most expensive and least efficient health provider at the population level among most developed nations.

The Affordable Care Act that squeaked through under President Barack Obama’s slim majority in Congress in 2009 was not true health reform—it was mostly an expansion of health insurance to nearly 50 million uninsured Americans—50 million!—and a first step to change the broken health insurance market. It was never meant to be the start of a national health system, like Canada’s or France’s.

But this mattered little to the nearly half of the American electorate in November, many who were lower-income and who supported a billionaire who boasted of not paying U.S. income taxes. Trump knew that. He knew facts did not matter, the same way the GOP was able to defend the monopolistic and dysfunctional health system for years while health insurance middlemen were gobbling up the nation’s economic resources. Trump simply reflected all that was said repeatedly before, like a mirror.

What about Trump’s promise to “make America great again,” and bring back those shuttered factories in depressed Midwest towns and coal production in Appalachia. Here is where Trump broke ranks with the GOP, seeing his golden opportunity. Trump had been paying attention. He and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont were sharply aware of millions of lost manufacturing jobs and closed factories and mills since well before 1994. The establishment of both parties were not.

For the last 20 years, America has seen its manufacturing base shrink while factory jobs fled across the border to our NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico, or overseas to China and Asia. FiveThirtyEight reports the United States “has lost more than 4.5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA took effect in 1994.”

Who really cares about ailing Midwest industrial cities in the post-NAFTA era? Many there thought no one did and just swung an election to a billionaire who had nothing in common with those who live there.

That pain is visible in nearly every crumbling Midwestern city, which have repeatedly been ignored and long deemed unworthy of saving. No one, not even the Democrats, really cares about the devastated community that is now Detroit, except Detroiters, even though candidates Trump and Clinton both used it as their prop to talk about their vision for the economy. For that matter, few in Washington and less in the GOP really have cared about Youngstown, St. Louis, Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Flint, or other industrial cities that slid into oblivion since the passage of NAFTA. The GOP, until the Trump tornado, had promoted outsourcing and trade policies that sped up the loss of manufacturing.

While Both Clinton and Trump campaigned for votes in Detroit and Michigan, as well as Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Trump’s message about feeling the overwhelmingly visible dislocation seen everywhere in the Midwest resonated. The angry, white, dislocated Midwest blue-collar worker became a larger than life meta symbol of the Trump constituency and the key voting bloc that gave him victory.

Flint native and left-leaning independent filmmaker Michael Moore predicted the vote outcome in every single Midwestern state and national election perfectly three weeks before the election in his must-see film Michael Moore in Trumpland.

Always the savvy cultural observer, Moore described why those angry and almost all white voters would revolt and go for Trump on election day: “On November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system because it’s your right! Trump’s election is going to be the biggest ‘fuck you’ ever recorded in human history. And it will feel good. For a day. Eh, maybe a week, possibly a month.” Then, a few months later, they would realize they were conned, and, as he said, “It will be too late to do anything about it.” Because Moore is a Joe Blow himself, he and more importantly his insights were ignored or sidelined by the pundits and the Democratic National Committee, who had been missing the warning signs that had been festering all election, but really for the decades before.

Reality Sets in, and the Threats to American Democracy Are Real

Now that the election is over, we are all beginning to see the likely devastating outcomes. Hate crime activity is rising. White nationalists, the Klan, neo-Nazis, and others feel legitimized to speak openly of promoting fascist and extremist views.

Adolph Hitler with President Paul von Hindenburg of the Weimar Republic, after the 1932 election that saw the Nazis win more seats to the Reichstag than any other party, but not a majority of the posts. Two years after the election, Hindenburg would die in office, ushering in the dictatorship of Chancellor Hitler, who took power first through the ballot box.

Public officials who support Trump are even now actively talking of creating a national registry for Muslims and frankly discussing the policy of Japanese American internment camps from the 1940s. These are all echoes of Germany, after Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party. It won less than a full majority of seats in the German Reichstag in 1932, and the party under Hitler and his circle managed to turn Germany into a totalitarian state that murdered at least 11 million in camps, on top of tens of other millions killed in war.

Between Nov. 9 and 14 alone, the Southern Poverty Law Center collected 437 reports of hateful intimidation and harassment. Many cases involved references to the Trump campaign or its slogans. Many had taken place at schools, where bullies and racists are feeling emboldened by the new openness in hate discourse.

I remain profoundly worried what will happen to my nation and its most vulnerable members. Many challenges lie ahead. But I completely agree with Moore’s top two action items he laid down the day after Americans woke up in a bed the GOP had been making for decades. For my part, I will, as Moore argues, support that take over of the Democratic Party and its return to the people. They have, as Moore wrote so clearly, “failed us miserably.”

It will be up to the party itself to see if it takes action on item No. 2 on Moore’s list—so far, they have not. If you have not read that list, here it that item: “Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn’t let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must ‘heal the divide’ and ‘come together.’ They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.”

And what is next? Many from President Barack Obama down to the thousands of street protesters after the election see the next four years as a real fight for democracy that is now very, very much in peril. The GOP has never had more power in state capitals and Congress. A true charismatic demagogue just took power, without winning a popular vote, the way it happened in Germany in 1932. The fight has begun, and it will be bitter and costly. The stakes have never been higher since the country successfully came together and helped defeat the Axis Powers in World War II. But the fight will be for the soul and future of the country. History will judge how successful we are.